


Research

by casesandcapitals



Series: The AU AU [3]
Category: My Chemical Romance
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-19
Updated: 2015-07-19
Packaged: 2018-04-10 03:15:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4375037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/casesandcapitals/pseuds/casesandcapitals
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They hadn't talked about the desert.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Research

The blisters from his desert boots were still there when Gerard checked. He stood up and stared into the bathroom mirror, imagining long red hair in place of his normal black hair.  
The dirt and sand hadn't clung to their skin, but his nose and cheeks were slightly sunburnt.  
"Gerard!" his mom called. "You're gonna be late!"  
"Coming!" he yelled back. He spent half a moment more staring into the mirror, then turned and left the bathroom, shutting the light off behind him.

It had been two days since Gerard and Frank went into the old house and found the desk. Two days since they'd woken up in a desert filled with teenagers and laser guns and bright colors.  
They had gone home that morning, back to Gerard's house, and snuck into his basement bedroom without anyone in his family knowing that they had been out all night. After sleeping for a few more hours, Frank had gone home, the shirt they had stolen still in his bag and the red-jeweled ring still on his finger.  
They hadn't talked about the desert.

Gerard pulled into the high school parking lot and spent a few minutes just sitting in his car. He had started to worry over the weekend that maybe the whole thing had been a dream. Except for the fact that he still had a green-jeweled ring on.  
Maybe he had inhaled some weird mold spores and had an extremely vivid hallucination? That would explain why they didn't seem to really leave the house but he still had the ring on?  
Gerard shook his head. He would just pretend it never happened.

Frank pounced on him the moment he got his locker open.  
"Hey!" Frank said, jittering. "I saw Jimmy yesterday and gave him the shirt. He was totally impressed that we stayed all night and slept there and everything."  
Gerard gave a half-hearted grin and continued to pile books into his locker.  
"Anyway," Frank continued, "I present you with one hundred well earned dollars. We should stop by the comic store after school."  
Gerard accepted the two fifties from Frank and stared at them. He handed one of the bills back.  
"Here, you can have yours, it's cool. You earned it too."  
"Dude." Frank looked genuinely touched as he took his fifty dollars. "I wonder how much this is in carbons."  
"What?" Gerard practically shrieked.  
"What?" Frank repeated, confused.  
"You- What do you mean, carbons?"  
"I just mean like, I wonder how much shit we could buy in that desert with whatever fifty dollars converted into carbons is," Frank said.  
"You remember that?" Gerard whispered, making sure no one was close enough in the hall to overhear him.  
"'Course I do, how could I frickin' forget?" Frank chuckled.  
Gerard shut his locker door a little too hard, then realized he hadn't grabbed the books he needed for his first classes and started spinning the combination lock again.  
"Are you alright?" Frank asked.  
"I just thought, you know... it was a crazy dream or something. I guess."  
Frank raised his eyebrows, grinning. "You're still wearing your ring."  
"'Course I am, you said it was a gift," Gerard huffed, reaching back in for his books.  
Frank chuckled again and waved his own red-jeweled ring in front of Gerard's face. "I think we should go back this weekend and try a different button," he whispered conspiratorially.

It took the entire week for Frank to actually convince Gerard to at least go back to the old house and have another look around. It wasn't until they were actually standing outside the house on Saturday morning that Gerard admitted that maybe it hadn't been a vivid dream.

"I dunno Frankie," Gerard sighed as he set his bag down in the dilapidated living room. It looked a lot less scary and a lot more sad in the weak September daylight. "Are you sure this is a good idea? Maybe we should just press the number one again if we're going to test it? Why try a whole different world when we could go back to the one we kinda got a handle on?"  
"Dude, we're explorers now!" Frank said, excitedly waving his hands in a wide circle, like mapping out a globe. "We gotta try a different one! We can go back to the desert some other time, okay?"  
Frank set out down the hallway and immediately found the staircase, he started climbing without checking to see if Gerard was following.  
Gerard sighed. "I didn't mean I _wanted_ to go back to the desert, I just meant that if we're _testing_ it-"  
"Dude, Gerard." Frank pouted down at him from the second floor. "Please? Come on, it'll be cool now that we know what's going on."  
Gerard held out against Frank's puppy dog eyes for a whole five seconds before he sighed again and followed him up.

The office was exactly how they had left it; still and dusty and creepy. Gerard could see large swaths of the hardwood floor that had been wiped clean by their clothes when they had fallen asleep.  
"This is so weird," Gerard muttered.  
Frank walked right over to the desk and popped open the hidden compartment.  
"What do you think, number two this time?" he asked, reaching into the desk.  
"Wait, hang on! Just- just hold on for a second, okay?"  
Frank drew his hand back and looked over at Gerard, still huddled in the doorway.  
"Can we just look around in here for a bit? Maybe William wrote about all the worlds and we can get a little bit of an idea where we're headed before we dive right in."  
"Alright, maybe that's a good idea." Frank stepped away from the desk reluctantly, then added in a whisper, "ruin all my fun."  
The two boys started poking around the office, this time with the help of daylight streaming in through the thick window. Frank started sifting through the paintings again while Gerard read through the scrolls of parchment in and around the desk.  
He was halfway through a detailed description of how William acquired the desk (apparently there was a lot of gold and traveling and shady characters involved) when Frank called out to him.  
"Gee, hey Gerard! Come check it out!"  
Gerard looked around to see Frank holding up a notebook filled with sketches, and one of the sketches was the weird smiley face from the vending machine and canned food in the desert.  
"Holy crap," Gerard uttered, crossing the room to take a closer look. He gently flipped through some pages and saw sketches of Joshua trees and rattlesnakes and clunky, square-ish guns. All the pages were labeled _1_ in the top corner.  
"He went to the desert too," Frank grinned.  
"Do you think this is what the guns looked like two hundred years ago?" Gerard wondered, running a finger down the edge of a page.  
"Maybe. I can't believe that place has been a desert for two hundred years! Like, doesn't it ever rain there?"  
Gerard glanced at Frank before continuing to flip through the sketch book. "You're too excited about this, again. Also, it must rain sometimes if there's trees and snakes and, like, people there. It's just probably really rare."  
"You're probably right," Frank said, turning back to the bookshelf he had been rifling through. "But that's not all I wanted to show you," he added, sounding giddy. "The dude didn't just draw shit from the desert, look."  
Gerard looked up and gaped. An entire bookcase had been dedicated to the little sketchbooks, all labeled with a number. Frank pulled the second book off its shelf and waved it around with a grin.  
"Wanna know where we might be heading?"  
"Oh my God," Gerard whispered, snapping the desert book shut. "Lemme see!"  
Frank beamed at Gerard's excitement and they traded books. Gerard carefully cracked the number two sketchbook open.  
"It's... wow." Gerard suddenly stepped around Frank and started thumbing through the stacked paintings.  
"What?" Frank asked. "What is it?"  
Gerard pulled out one of the paintings they had seen the weekend before, the one with mermaids. He flipped it over and searched the back of the stretched canvas until he found a small inked **2** in the corner.  
"Mermaids?!" Frank practically shouted. He took the sketchbook from Gerard's hands and flipped through it. "Holy shit. Holy shit! Mermaids dude! Can we go now, _please_? This is too cool."  
Gerard took a deep breath and set the canvas back on the stack. "Yeah," he muttered slowly. "Yeah, okay. But we should eat and drink first, like we agreed."  
Frank rolled his eyes. "Fine. God, you're like my mom, so responsible."  
"As far as I can tell we were in that desert for half a day, maybe more. We don't know if we'll be able to find food in this world, and remember how hungry you were? If we're gonna be _explorers_ we have to be prepared."  
"Yes, mom," Frank chuckled.  
They went back downstairs to their bags and dug out the water bottles and sandwiches they had packed. Gerard flicked through the sketchbook while he ate one-handed.  
"Anything cool?" Frank asked with his mouth full. "Or, you know," he swallowed, "cooler than fucking mermaids?"  
"It all seems like normal ocean stuff," Gerard reported. "Besides the mermaids, obviously. I mean, coral reefs, squid, fish, caves and crevasses and stuff. He even drew in a hammerhead shark."  
Frank almost choked on his bite of sandwich.  
"Man," Gerard continued, "he must have been so fascinated. I mean, they didn't exactly have the Discovery Channel or Animal Planet back then, you know? I wonder if he thought _all_ of this was other-universe stuff, instead of just the mermaids?"  
"Didn't people think sea monsters were real back then?" Frank wondered aloud. "Because everyone was sailing but kinda stupid and religious and stuff?"  
"Hmm, good point." Gerard flipped through to the back of the book and frowned, "I wish he had written about the worlds instead of just drawing them."  
"There's plenty more books up there, maybe he wrote in the other ones?"  
Gerard looked intrigued but Frank shot him down quickly.  
"No way! We're exploring first, _then_ you can read about his time there."  
"But-"  
"No, Gee, you can't go in all, you know, influenced by what he wrote. You gotta experience it by yourself."  
Gerard was impressed and actually smiled. "Okay, Frankie. You're totally right."  
"I totally am," Frank said with a self satisfied grin. He stuffed the last bit of his sandwich in his mouth and jumped to his feet. "Time to go!"

**Author's Note:**

> I'm taking suggestions for alternate universes! Just leave a comment with your idea :)


End file.
